Miracle Workers (2019)

A surprising and very funny workplace comedy--complete with coffee runs and co-worker crushes--that happens to take place in Heaven.

Its short run makes Workers not a particularly Earth-shattering series. But it's a charming, chipper story that suggests humans are inevitably good.

Miracle Workers is more amusing than full-fledged funny, but the show’s saving grace is its ensemble.

There are enough sharp details drawn in the margins of the factory (where Angela Kinsey from The Office runs HR) to suggest a more promising second season.

Lightweight and fluffy, energetic, easy to watch and even like, but as ephemeral as a soap bubble and perhaps less meaningful [than the novel].

This seven-episode limited series is both cynical (about God as CEO) and full of hope (about the potential for humanity). It’s also consistently clever and funny.

You’re not likely to come out of any episode reconsidering the meaning of life, in other words. But under­lying Rich’s farce is a sharp--and bleak--analogy for the state of the world: Heaven Inc. is failing because it can’t make 7.5 billion individuals happy when their fates are so tightly entwined that one person’s godsend is sure to be another’s curse.

It isn't a gut buster. The jokes are refined and subtle, so if you like over-the-top gags and laugh tracks, this won't be the sitcom for you.

What ensues is strange, eccentric but fitfully funny.

The show is all over the place: it’s sharp when squinting at absurdity, juvenile when diarrhea jokes plop to the fore, sappy when it spares a moment to cherish the mystery and majesty of creation.

The laughs aren’t plentiful enough, the ideas aren’t exciting enough, and the story isn’t gripping enough.

The cast of Miracle Workers is certainly strong. ... For now, the initial season’s commentary on the advantages and disadvantages of freedom of choice seems to be lacking something its characters are missing, too: a stronger sense of discipline.

Rich and company show the gears, the ingredients and the packaging. More mystery, as Radcliffe knows, is always a good thing.

It’s a show that you keep waiting to click into gear, to get funnier, smarter, more enjoyable--and there are glimpses of it in Buscemi’s hang-dog approach and Radcliffe’s quirky performance--but it never quite gets there. It’s a TV prayer left unanswered.

Some genuine charm here and Buscemi; otherwise premise, story and that joke get old--fast.

The only bright spots are the aforementioned Buscemi, Radcliffe’s occasionally charming oddball behavior (he loves to squirt mustard packets into his mouth to celebrate a job well done), and a man named Mike Dunston. ... It strains so much for clever zings, then becomes bulky when it devotes episode-long subplots to killing Bill Maher by exploding his penis, or humiliating the executive archangel (Karan Soni) by showing him tending to God after the deity’s bouts of diarrhea.

It all ends predictably--and flatly. A grin or two may intrude amid all the bountiful bad taste. It’s certainly not enough, though, to redeem a series that false starts and then keeps stumbling. Full of grace it’s not.